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Picasso
Each volume in this new series offers an in-depth exploration of one major work in MoMA's collection. Through a lively illustrated essay by a MoMA curator that examines the work in detail, the publication delves into aspects of the artist's oeuvre and places the work in a broader social and arthistorical context.
Wyeth
In 1948 Andrew Wyeth produced what would become one of the most iconic paintings in American art: a desolate landscape featuring a woman lying in a field, that he called "Christina's World." The woman in the painting, Christina Olson, lived in Cushing, Maine, where Wyeth and his wife kept a summer house. She suffered from polio, and was paralyzed from the waist down; Wyeth was moved to portray her when he saw her one day crawling through the field towards her house. "Christina's World" was to become one of the most well-loved and most scorned works of the twentieth century, igniting heated arguments about parochialism, sentimentality, kitsch and elitism that have continued to dog the art world and Wyeth's own reputation, even after the artist's death in 2009. An essay by MoMA curator Laura Hoptman revisits the genesis of the painting, discussing Wyeth's curious focus, over the course of his career, on a deliberately delimited range of subjects and exploring the mystery that continues to surround the enigmatic painting.
Helen Levitt
A close reading of Helen Levitt's famous photograph of three children at play on a New York stoop Helen Levitt's (1913-2009) photographs from the 1930s and 1940s of the communities of New York City's Harlem are startling achievements of street photography. They catch the evanescent configurations of gesture, movement, pose and expression that make visible the street as surreal theater, and everyday life as art and mystery. The unguarded life of children at play became, understandably, Levitt's particular preoccupation. Levitt resisted political readings of her work, and distanced herself from the progressive impulses of social documentary photography. But class, race and gender are everywhere at work in Levitt's images. The diffidence and deceptive artlessness of the images also hide her devotion to both popular and avant-garde cinema, attention to the work of other photographers and frequenting of New York's museums and galleries. Here, Shamoon Zamir, Professor of Literature and Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi, examines the different registers and contexts of Levitt's work through a reading of New York, one of Levitt's iconic images.
Oppenheim: Object
In 1936, invited by André Breton to contribute to an exhibition of Surrealist objects, Meret Oppenheim (1913-1985) decided to act upon a café conversation she had recently had with Pablo Picasso and his then-companion Dora Maar. Commenting on a fur-covered bracelet that Oppenheim had made for the designer Schiaparelli, Picasso remarked that one could cover just about anything in fur, to which Oppenheim responded, 'Even this cup and saucer.' The resulting sculpture was 'Object, ' a teacup, saucer and spoon purchased from a department store and lined with Chinese gazelle fur. An essay by Carolyn Lanchner, retired Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA, discusses the enigmatic, sensually disturbing nature of this transformed tea set, its sensational impact on its first audiences and its enduring fascination as an icon of Surrealism.
Robert Frank
During an extended road trip across the United States, Robert Frank pointed his camera lens at a passing trolley in New Orleans, took a single exposure, and then turned back to bustling Canal Street, where crowds of people swarmed the sidewalks. That single click of the shutter produced a picture with enduring clarity: a row of windows framing the streetcar's passengers--white passengers in the front, Black passengers in the back. An essay by curator Lucy Gallun explores images in the context of Frank's photobook The Americans and in relation to other photographs of the 1950s and '60s.
De Chirico
"The unexpected encounter of a rubber glove, a green ball, and the head from the classical statue gives rise to one of the most compelling paintings in the history of modernist art: Giorgio de Chirico's Song of Love (1914). This uncanny image exemplifies what de Chirico called 'metaphysical' painting, which creates a disturbing sense of unreality, outside the usual logics of space and time, through the novel depiction of ordinary things. Emily Braun's essay explores the work's enigmatic motifs, showing how their roots range from the ancient culture of the Mediterranean, through the commercial scenarios de Chirico observed in the streets of Paris in the years around World War I, to the work of the avant-garde painters and poets of the time. The Song of Love continues to captivate viewers as de Chirico intended, even a century after it was made." - Back cover.
Betye Saar
Uneasy Dancer brings together over 80 works including installations, assemblages, collages and sculptures by the pioneering Los Angeles artist Betye Saar (born 1926) produced between 1966 and 2016. This handsomely designed volume presents Saar's work as a copiously illustrated timeline, with numerous documentary images and exhibition details. "Uneasy Dancer" is an expression Saar has used to define both herself and her artistic practice: "my work moves in a creative spiral with the concepts of passage, crossroads, death and rebirth, along with the underlying elements of race and gender." Through her use of found objects, personal memorabilia and derogatory images that evoke denied or distorted narratives, Saar developed a powerful social critique that challenges racial and sexist stereotypes deeply rooted in American culture.
Jacob Lawrence
In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just twenty-three years old, completed a series of sixty small tempera paintings with text captions about the Great Migration. Within months of its making, Lawrence's Migration series was divided between The Museum of Modern Art (even numbered panels) and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (odd numbered panels). The work has since become a landmark in the history of African-American art, a monument in the collections of both institutions, and a crucial example of the way in which history painting was radically reimagined in the modern era. In 2015 and 2016, marking the centenary of the Great Migration's start (1915-16), the panels will be reunited in exhibitions at T...
Ringgold: Die
Ten adults--men and women, black and white--fight, flee or die over the twelve-foot span of American People Series #20: Die, as an interracial pair of children cowers unnoticed in their midst. While Faith Ringgold (born 1930) was devising this bloody spectacle in a Manhattan studio in the summer of 1967, civil unrest was convulsing black neighborhoods across the US. Art historian Anne Monahan's essay explores the mural's carefully orchestrated chaos and its multiform inspirations, from contemporary anxiety about black revolution, through the writings of James Baldwin and LeRoi Jones, to iconic canvases by Picasso and Pollock then on view at MoMA.
Sophie Taeuber-Arp
A dancer, designer, puppet maker, sculptor and painter at the heart of the Zurich Dada movement, Taeuber-Arp made Head in the wake of World War I, during a time of profound political and cultural self-questioning. Almost a century later, her witty wooden figure has lost none of its punch as an investigation of art across aesthetic and material boundaries rather than within them.
